Clipped accents and clipped wings

"The two facts that emerge most glaringly from Barber's book are that Powell was a colossal snob and not very bright," announced John Carey in the Sunday Times of Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: A Life. He noted that Barber is "as entranced as Powell by the mystique of Eton [and] just as obsessed with society gossip ... Powell can be said to have found the biographer he deserved." Writing in the Independent on Sunday, DJ Taylor had a higher regard for Powell as "the greatest English novelist of the 20th century", but he encountered nothing new in Barber's book to "startle the experienced Powell-fancier". Hilary Spurling in the Daily Telegraph also found "little fresh insight and no surprises", observing that it "is written in the bland, reductive tone of a school report patronising a mediocre pupil".

Reviewing The Fit by Philip Hensher, Caroline Moore in the Sunday Telegraph was reminded of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but she disliked the "incipient sentimentality of the ending". "Anyone contemplating organising a wedding should buy The Fit first," advised a more enthusiastic Ruth Scurr in the Times. "It will help you take yourself less seriously." But Adam Mars-Jones in the Observer questioned Hensher's use of Asperger's syndrome for comic effect. "No one could be so knowingly in the dark," he observed of the narrator, "faux autism and stand-up comedy simply don't mix."

Over in the Spectator Hensher was tackling Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières. He admired "some superbly mounted set pieces", but objected to "the acres of boring writing in the Ataturk sections". "The book feels as if it has been assembled from bits and pieces, like an Ikea pack," complained David Robson in the Sunday Telegraph. "After a rightly admired small novel, De Bernières has produced a stumbling giant." Lewis Jones in the Daily Telegraph described reading it as "like watching Captain Pugwash while being lectured by Melvyn Bragg and waiting for Jake and Dinos Chapman to turn up". Only Amanda Craig in the Independent on Sunday declared it "a masterpiece", albeit one that "should have been pruned by a third". She was sorry the critical response had been so hostile, asserting that De Bernières's "passionate compassion for ordinary people ... displays, with magnificence, both the shallowness of most modern fiction - and its critics."